This Birding Life: The Best of the Guardian's Birdwatch

By Stephen Moss

This collection of essays “gives bird enthusiasts the next best thing to birdwatching, an eloquent and insightful consideration of birds and birding” (Publishers Weekly).

Stephen Moss’s collection of Guardian “Birdwatch” columns forms a fascinating picture of one man’s birding life: from early coot-watching as a young boy, through teenage cycle trips to Dungeness, to adult travels around the world as a TV producer working everywhere from the Gambia to Antarctica.

Drawing on nearly twenty years of columns for the Guardian, Stephen covers local, national and foreign birding encounters. From the (varying) excitement and peace of his chosen pursuit, to the growing uncertainties posed by climate change, the author brings an enthusiasm and sincerity to the subject that will energise even the most fair-weather of birdwatchers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781312117

Stephen Moss

Stephen Moss has been a keen birder all his life, and has written a number of books on the subject. A journalist and broadcaster, he writes a monthly column for the Guardian, and contributes regularly to BBC Wildlife magazine. As a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, his series include ‘Birding with Bill Oddie, ’Springwatch’ and ‘The Nature of Britain’, presented by Alan Titchmarsh.

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Prologue

JUNE 1998

It’s over 35 years since I began watching birds. OK, so I was only a toddler when I started, but in biblical terms, that’s more than half a lifetime.

In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s celebrated book about supporting Arsenal Football Club, he wonders how many childhood pastimes you’re still enjoying when you reach middle age. Playing with Lego? Only when the kids absolutely insist. Wearing short trousers? Only when I travel abroad and really let my hair down. Making up complicated fantasy games and losing myself in another world? Not as often as I’d like.

So why do I still pick up a pair of binoculars and a book of coloured pictures, and go out into the countryside to watch small, feathered creatures? It’s not as if I don’t have better things to do: piles of urgent tasks at work and home, and the whole multitude of distractions and entertainments available to late twentieth-century man.

Perhaps that’s why I enjoy watching birds. In an ever-changing world, it provides a stability and continuity hard to find elsewhere. Indeed, it occurred to me recently that when I’m watching a particular bird, it often brings to mind the many other times I’ve seen that species.

For example, a lone Jackdaw just flew past my window. Seeing that bird reminded me of one afternoon a few years ago, in Galilee, in the north of Israel. I stood in the gathering dusk, in the heart of the Hula Valley, waiting for a spectacular roost of more than 20,000 cranes to pass overhead. Suddenly, I heard a familiar call: a harsh ‘chack’, multiplied many times. The sound came from a flock of almost a thousand Jackdaws, feeding in a lush, irrigated field. Until that moment, I didn’t even know this species lived in Israel, let alone gathered there in such vast numbers.

Closing my eyes, I remembered all the other times and places I’d heard Jackdaws call, or watched as ragged black silhouettes swept across the sky. A Gloucestershire village on New Year’s Day, when it was the very first bird I saw that year. The tower of an ancient Norfolk church, with a flock of Jackdaws angrily mobbing a passing Osprey. And a service station on the M4, where Rooks and Jackdaws gathered to scavenge morsels of food dropped by passing motorists.

I have a photograph of me as a toddler, aged 18 months or so, my hand outstretched to a bird. It was a tame Jackdaw, and I remember my mother telling me that it had turned up in our garden sometime back in late 1961. For a few months, it hung around to be fed, and then disappeared. Later on she showed me the photograph, and the image stuck in my mind.

Looking back, I suppose this Jackdaw was the first bird I ever looked at. Did this chance encounter, together with a child’s curiosity, lead to a lifetime’s all-consuming obsession with birds? Or did I throw it a piece of bread, turn away, and go off to play with my toys? I don’t know. But I do know that whenever I see a Jackdaw, half a lifetime’s worth of memories rise to the surface.

CHAPTER 1

Growing up

1963–1982

The pieces in this chapter are a selection of my childhood birding experiences. Starting in the south-west London suburbs – in those days known as Middlesex – they cover the two places that really got me hooked on birds: the gravel-pits at Shepperton and the reservoirs at Staines.

They continue through family summer holidays, and my first tentative trips as a teenager – made with Daniel, my schoolmate, dear friend and birding companion for the past four decades. The chapter ends with a memorable trip I made to the Shetland Isles after leaving university – a trip which, looking back a quarter of a century on, I now realise convinced me to continue birding into my adult life.

Reading them again, I am struck first by the many discomforts we went through to see birds: we certainly suffered for our pleasures back in the 1970s. But they also evoke a time of innocence, when life was really much simpler: we wanted to see birds, so we got on our bikes and looked for them. In doing so we went to wonderful places and met some extraordinary people; and this combination of birds, places and people is, in essence, what birding is all about.

Funny black ducks

JANUARY 1996

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in birds. Big birds, small birds, brightly coloured birds in nature films, little brown birds hopping about the garden. Sparrows and swifts, gulls and geese, waders and warblers – and funny black ducks.

Yes, funny black ducks. Well, it had to start somewhere. And in my case, a lifetime’s fascination with birds began with an experience I share with every child, past and present: feeding the ducks.

It was one of those dull, grey winter weekends back in 1963. Bored at home, I persuaded my mother to drive the mile or so down to the Thames at Laleham, in our yellow Ford Anglia. When we arrived, I began the ritual of chucking one piece of bread at the assembled Mallards while stuffing another in my mouth. Suddenly I stopped, my hunger overcome by a three-year-old’s curiosity. I turned to my mother and asked the question: ‘What are those funny black ducks?’

Despite having spent part of her childhood evacuated to the Devon countryside, my mother was not the greatest bird identification expert. In fact she had no idea what they were and tried to fob me off by changing the subject. With all the tenacity of a curious child, I persisted. And to her great credit, instead of shutting me up with another piece of bread, she promised to find out.

When we got home, she remembered that the previous Christmas one of my aunts or uncles had given me a small brown book: the Observer’s Book of Birds. Glancing through its pages, she found the answer to the mystery: they weren’t ‘funny black ducks’ at all, but Coots.

I picked up the book and, as they say, couldn’t put it down. To my three-year-old brain, the tiny watercolour plates and abbreviated text were the fuel for a new obsession. I began to memorise the names of every single bird, starting with Magpie on page 18, and continuing until the final entry on page 217, a rather disappointing black-and-white illustration of a Capercaillie.

Many years later, having children of my own, I can appreciate the single-minded way in which I immersed myself in my new-found interest. OK, so birds didn’t have to compete against Nintendo, Jurassic Park and the Simpsons. But watching my own five-year-old son, James, engrossed in the modern equivalent of the Observer’s books, I’m glad to see that some things don’t change.

I think what really captured my imagination was realising that birds were actually living, breathing creatures – not just stuck inside the pages of my little brown book. Since then, birds have become a lifetime’s interest – occasionally bordering on an obsession. I can’t help it. It’s a bit like being a West Ham supporter – I’m stuck with it until death do us part.

Of course I’m not alone. There are millions of people around the world who enjoy watching birds, and whether their interest began at the age of three or seventy-three, they all have a story to tell about what started them off.

As to why we enjoy watching birds, well that’s a tough one. It can’t be because we enjoy being the butt of predictable jokes, or getting our feet wet, or walking for miles in the freezing cold. We do it in our spare time, yet calling it a hobby seems less than adequate. Perhaps the late James Fisher, writer and ornithologist, summed it up best when he wrote: ‘The observation of birds may be a superstition, a tradition, an art, a science, a pleasure, a hobby or a bore: this depends entirely on the nature of the observer.’ For me birdwatching is all of these things, and much, much more.

Down the pits

MARCH 1996

During the years following the Second World War, strange blue holes began to appear on the Ordnance Survey map of west London. They weren’t the work of aliens, the Ministry of Defence or a slapdash cartographer – but gravel-pits.

Originally dug to extract gravel for the postwar housing boom, they soon began to fill up with water, and trees and bushes started to appear. By the time I was growing up in the area during the 1960s, the ‘pits’, as we called them, had become a huge, outdoor playground. For an eight-year-old boy, they held an infinite promise of adventure.

I first visited Shepperton Gravel Pits in 1968. I was on a nature trail with class 2H, Saxon School, under the watchful eye of Mrs Threlfall. As we wandered in a loose crocodile along the footpath, I caught sight of my very first Great Crested Grebe – a really special bird.

After that first visit, you couldn’t keep me away. In those far-off days, before the current hysteria about the danger from child molesters, youngsters were allowed to spend weekends and school holidays exploring places like this on their own. So our ‘gang’ – Alan, Glyn, Ian, Rob and I – spent hours on end building rafts, playing hide-and-seek and catching tadpoles in the nearby brook.

But gradually, I spent less time playing, and more time on my own, seeking out the birdlife. The Great Crested Grebes were still the main attraction, carrying their humbug-striped young on their backs like yuppie parents on a trip to IKEA. In winter, there were flocks of Tufted Ducks and Pochard, and a small group of Cormorants; in summer, ‘little brown jobs’ that I finally identified as Reed Warblers.

One August Bank Holiday my mother and I went to collect elderberries to make home-made wine – and I remember seeing two Black Terns that had dropped in during their southbound migration, dipping into the water for food.

But the most memorable event took place a year or so earlier, on 3 May 1970. My field notebook, covered with scribbled hieroglyphics, records the weather as ‘blooming hot’ – a daring profanity for one so young. That day, I went for a walk with Roger Trent, a tiny lad in the same class as me who had also become interested in birdwatching. We were looking out over the water and probably thinking about going off to play football, when a huge bird flew overhead.

Now normally, huge birds in south-east England are herons, but we’d seen herons and knew it couldn’t be one of those. So for the rest of the day we followed the bird up and down, as it flapped lazily from one side of the pit to the other. We were pretty sure that it was some kind of bird of prey, and finally decided it must be a Buzzard. By then we were hot, grubby and tired, so we went back home for a glass of orange squash and Thunderbirds on the telly.

It wasn’t until 14 years later, when I finally saw a migrating Osprey near the very same gravel-pits, that I realised the identity of our mystery bird. The date, the weather, the habitat and the memory of the bird itself make me sure that what we saw was one of these majestic raptors, making its return journey from Africa to Scotland.

Now, of course, it’s too late to go back and find out. Soon afterwards, Roger and his family took advantage of the famous £10 a head passage and emigrated to Australia. As all ten-year-old friends do, we promised faithfully to write, but after exchanging a postcard each, the correspondence ground to a halt. Even so, more than 25 years later, I just have to open up my faded notebook to recall every moment of that warm spring day.

Heaven and hell

FEBRUARY 1996

In Madrid, they have a saying about the city’s weather. ‘Nueve meses de invierno, tres de inferno — nine months of winter, three months of hell!’ It’s a long way from the Spanish capital to the outskirts of London, but this has always reminded me of Staines Reservoirs, where I did a lot of my early birdwatching during the 1970s.

Between September and May, and especially during the winter months, it was so cold you just wanted to lie down and die. First your fingers froze, then your toes, then everything else. It didn’t help that you were standing on an exposed concrete causeway, surrounded by two huge basins of water, across which the wind whipped mercilessly. By contrast, during the summer months it could be unbearably hot, made worse by the vast flocks of midges which gathered along the causeway, preying on passing birdwatchers.

So why did anyone go there at all? Perhaps because of all the sites in west London, Staines Reservoirs was the place most likely to produce good birds. It needed to be – with Heathrow-bound aeroplanes shattering the peace every minute or two, you wouldn’t go near the place unless you thought you were going to see something good.

I first visited the reservoirs with a group from the Young Ornithologists’ Club, on 17 November 1969. I remember the date because at the time, I thought it might be my last day on Earth. This was before the days of thermal underwear and windproof coats, so my mother dressed me up in the kind of jacket you wear to the shops, adding a thin pair of gloves as an afterthought. I suppose I should consider myself lucky I wasn’t in the short trousers we wore to school every day.

I can’t remember seeing any birds through the tears brought on by a force six northerly gale. I do remember looking through my pair of (borrowed) binoculars at some black dots sitting on the water about five miles away, which I think may have been Pochard. Or Wigeon. Or just black dots.

I also remember ‘dipping out’ for the first time – failing to catch a glimpse of the Cormorant that everyone else seemed to have seen. Good practice for later birding failures, I suppose.

After the outing, we returned to the car park of the Crooked Billet, a Berni Inn on the nearby A30. We staggered inside, and downed a large Scotch (my mother) and a hot Bovril (me). As the feeling returned to my extremities, I vowed never again to return to this godforsaken place.

Like so many resolutions, it didn’t last. I have a battered field notebook which starts with an entry dated 28 December 1969. This time, I saw a few more birds: it lists a total of 17 species, though with hindsight some of these look a bit dubious. One thing hadn’t changed, though: in the space provided for details of the weather, I simply wrote ‘freezing and frostbitten’.

After that, you couldn’t keep me away. During the mid-1970s, my friend Daniel and I visited Staines Reservoirs several hundred times, and kept ludicrously detailed lists of the birds we saw there. Our efforts paid off, at least occasionally. Highlights included summer-plumaged Black-necked Grebes, regular Little Gulls and, best of all, an invasion of what seemed like hundreds of Black Terns, in September 1974.

As the years went on, and I ventured further afield in search of birds, I visited Staines less and less. A quick hack up and down the causeway on New Year’s Day in search of species to boost my ‘year list’, and the odd trip to see a rarity were about the limit. Perhaps it was the sense of familiarity, or the excitement of exploring other, more picturesque sites, but I just found I couldn’t get excited about the place anymore. But it was great while it lasted.

We’re all going on a summer holiday

JULY 2OO5

As we set off on our family holiday to the south coast in July 2005, I had an unexpected flashback to the first time I visited the area, more than three decades ago. It was the summer of 1970, and at the age of ten I had just discovered the delights of birdwatching.

I was clutching my very first pair of binoculars, purchased for fourteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, and a pristine copy of the famous ‘Peterson, Mountfort & Hollom’ field guide. My mother and grandmother might have been looking forward to a relaxing rest on the beach, but I was determined to spend the whole fortnight in search of birds.

As soon as we arrived at the quiet little Hampshire resort of Milford-on-Sea, and had checked into our boarding house (imaginatively named ‘Sea Walls’), I was badgering my mother to take me for a walk. Fortunately Milford is situated next to some of the best tidal mudflats in the county, so as the sun began to set I found myself gazing with delight at Oystercatchers, Dunlin, Redshank and Curlew – all new species to me, and the start of my continuing passion for wading birds.

Within a couple of days we had graduated to the nearby Keyhaven Marshes, which held even greater prizes, including Bar-tailed and Black-tailed Godwits, and my first Blackcap and Stonechat – both singing out in the open, conveniently allowing me to identify them with certainty.

When not playing crazy golf or ruining my teeth with toffee apples and candy floss, I spent the holiday happily adding new birds to my ever-growing ‘life list’. Unfortunately having a field guide that included all the birds of continental Europe as well as Britain led to a few errors: such as the time I misidentified a small flock of Linnets on the lawn of our boarding house as Britain’s first Bar-tailed Desert Larks – a species confined to the arid deserts of North Africa and the Middle East.

We also visited the New Forest, where I correctly identified a Marsh Tit in the woods and a Grey Wagtail on one of the streams. But my favourite outing was a little further away, to Brownsea Island off the Dorset coast. We were given a guided tour of this delightful place, which seemed like a little piece of the Mediterranean in southern England.

This turned out to be even more appropriate. As we entered one of the hides overlooking a lagoon the warden gave an exclamation of surprise, for a hundred yards away, perched on a tree overhanging the water, was a snow-white apparition of a bird, glowing like none I had ever seen before. It was, of course, a Little Egret – a common enough bird nowadays, but at that time a true rarity. I later found out that the summer of 1970 saw a mini-invasion of these lovely birds, a foretaste of the permanent colonisation that occurred 20 years or so later.

No doubt this summer I shall see a few egrets, perhaps at Radipole Lake in Weymouth, or just on one of the pools along the coast. But nothing can take away the wonder of that very first sighting.

Master of Minsmere

APRIL 1996

If you want to spend a spring day birdwatching anywhere in the British Isles, you’d be hard pushed to beat the RSPB’s showpiece reserve at Minsmere, on the Suffolk coast. So when at the age of 13, I had the chance to visit, I couldn’t wait.

It was the Easter holidays, as my mother and I headed up the A12 for the unknown reaches of East Anglia. I remember stopping off somewhere in suburban Essex – not to watch birds, but to buy my birthday present, a pair of old-fashioned Zeiss binoculars. They may look like antiques now, but these East German optics were absolutely superb, opening up a whole new world of birding experience.

I was dying to try them out and didn’t have long to wait. If I remember correctly, we actually visited another RSPB reserve, Havergate Island, before making the pilgrimage to Minsmere. It was there that I saw my first Avocets.

For anyone who hasn’t seen an Avocet, it is one of those birds where pictures just can’t do justice to the real thing. Perched on long blue legs, with their black-and-white plumage and bizarre, upcurved bill, they look like something out of an avant-garde design competition.

I watched as one bird strolled right past our hide, utterly unconcerned at